Sergey Brin

In Conversation with John Battelle

Web 2.0 2005
30 minutes, 14mb, recorded 2005-10-06
Sergey Brin
Google has traveled a long way in a relatively short time from the first appearance of its clean search page to its much hyped IPO last year and its resulting multimillion dollar market capitalisation. Here, Sergey Brin talks about his own journey Stanford University graduate to Google co-founder. Attributing much of Google's success to luck, he says that he just followed his interests. While being at the heart of Silicon Valley was obviously fortuitous, it was not one of Brin's motives in choosing Stanford as a graduate school.

 

When asked about Yahoo CEO Terry Semel's comment that Google is number four in the list of internet portals, Sergey wittily responds that it means that Google is an underdog. He further elaborates on this topic by saying that he would like to think more as Google as a technology leader rather than a content rich portal. Google also does not want to follow Microsoft's "embrace and extend" philosophy to kill off smaller innovative companies.

Rebutting claims made on a number of websites, Brin says that Google is not planning to launch a web-based office productivity suite. He talks about how Google's AdSense advertising tool helps websites sustain themselves by generating revenues. Although Google recognises that click fraud is a problem, they have established internal teams to help combat it.


Sergey Brin is co-founder and President, Technology at Google. Originally a native of Moscow, he received a bachelor of science degree with honors in mathematics and computer science from the University of Maryland at College Park. He is currently on leave from the Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, where he received his master's degree. Sergey is a recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship as well as an honorary MBA from Instituto de Empresa. It was at Stanford that he met Larry Page and worked on the project that became Google. Together they founded Google Inc. in 1998, and Sergey continues to share responsibility for day-to-day operations with Larry Page and Eric Schmidt.

Sergey's research interests include search engines, information extraction from unstructured sources, and data mining of large text collections and scientific data. He has published more than a dozen academic papers and has been a featured speaker at several international academic, business and technology forums, including the World Economic Forum and the Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference. He has shared his views on the technology industry and the future of search on the Charlie Rose Show, CNBC, and CNNfn. In 2004, he and Larry Page were named "Persons of the Week" by ABC World News Tonight.

Resources for this podcast:

This presentation is one of a series from the Web 2.0 Conference held October 5-7, 2005 at the Argent Hotel in San Francisco.

For Team ITC:

  • Description editor: Vinayak Hegde
  • Post-production audio engineer: George Hawthorne
  • Series Editor: Graham Stewart

This free podcast is from our Web 2.0 Conference series.